Nov 27, 2020 Max Schleicher, Fall 2020 DM Graduate Fellow
Using Stylometry to Analyze Poetry Blurbs and Reviews
Max Schleicher is a PhD student in English, where he studies poetry and creative writing. He’s interested in the places the digital and poetic intersect. He is currently working on a manuscript of poems that treats the 18,000 hyper-specific Netflix categories (e.g., “Dark Mysteries with a Strong Female Lead”) as the setting for pastoral poems.
Briefly describe your project and the challenges, lessons learned, and obstacles overcome in the execution of it. What were the professional, academic, and personal motivations underlying your project?
My project was two-fold. First, I built a database of ~9,000 poetry book blurbs. Second, I applied a variety of text analysis techniques to understand and visualize trends in poetry books over the last 25 years.
Why the blurb? Blurbs offer a snapshot of what booksellers and blurbists think is truly compelling about a particular book published at a particular time. Blurbs praise the parts of the book the publishers think are the most relevant, compelling, and likely to inspire a consumer to buy the book. As such, by tracking how blurbs change over time, a researcher may be able to track how poetry books themselves change and how the poetry community’s values change as well.
As a poet and digital humanist, I find it challenging and rewarding to ask critical questions about the communities I’m involved with. This project attempts to historicize the very recent past (the last 25 years) of poetry publishing. In doing so, I hope it provides another vocabulary or way of thinking about how the poetry community has and will continue to change.
How did the Digital Matters Graduate Student Fellowship dovetail with your academic pursuits? What interested you in applying for this fellowship?
I applied for the fellowship because I wanted to continue to pursue digital and computational approaches to literature in an environment that allowed me to connect with scholars of different backgrounds, expertise, and perspectives. The fellowship offered me just that.
As an academic, I am really interested in how digital tools, computational linguistics, and digital humanities can provide a different perspective on literature—potentially giving researchers a “bird’s eye view” to see big picture shifts in literary landscapes. This kind of perspective is intellectually valuable because it reminds the literary academic of the value of distancing oneself from particular works of literature and thinking about literature on a larger scale. Rather than valuing a particular work of art as the expression of one remarkable author, we can think more broadly about literature as expressive of shifts in culture within literary communities.
The Digital Matters Fellowship has allowed me to continue to build my technical skills—and more importantly, it’s allowed me to interact with a group of really bright scholars who have influenced my work and exposed me to new lines of thinking.
What insights have you gained in regard to your specific field as a result of your project and fellowship experience?
My project has provided a number of insights—but more importantly, it’s provided a way to ask more questions in the future.
By tracking changes to the way blurbists praise books, I’ve been able to show shifts toward certain poetic modes (e.g., the “urgent” poetic lyric) and away from other poetic traditions (e.g., the “accessible” narrative). My research has shown a decreasing tendency to frame poetry books in terms of how they compare with the major figures of American poetry, suggesting a shift away from canonization.
This initial research suggests more questions. How does the way poetry books are marketed and blurbed differ for writers across gender and ethnicity? With datasets like the one I built, we can begin to ask and answer larger questions about the culture surrounding contemporary poetry.
What would you tell potential fellowship applicants to help them shape their own digital scholarship project?
Always start small. Have one question you really want to ask. By the time you’re three months into your project, it will have grown in scope and there will be a dozen more issues for you to tackle!
What do you see as the upcoming important issues surrounding digital scholarship in your field? What areas/issues could students and scholars investigate to extend the knowledge in this area?
Access and education. I find a project like my own really exciting, but I also know that English departments often aren’t training students with technical skills that allow them to ask the kinds of questions I asked in my research. Most students aren’t going to know how to write code to do the kind of analysis that I did. Most students also not going to know the technical and theoretical pitfalls to avoid when doing so.
Digital scholarship in English and Literary Studies will have a continuing challenge of skill-building. Often it takes months (or sometimes years) to build up a competent level of technical skills. At the same time, those skills need to be grounded in a theoretical understanding of digitality that challenges the notion that digital tools provide quick, transparent solutions and makes clear to students the problems inherent in digitality—interpretation can come pre-baked with digital tools that don’t leave enough room for gray area.
As English Departments engage with these problems and opportunities, having a well-built curriculum to teach technical and theoretical skills in digitality will be very important. I’m really excited about the work the University of Utah’s own English department is doing on this front. The new Digital Studies Certificate and digital coursework are really important steps in improving student education and fostering curiosity for studying digitality with a critical, but engaged eye.
This project attempts to historicize the very recent past (the last 25 years) of poetry publishing. In doing so, I hope it provides another vocabulary or way of thinking about how the poetry community has and will continue to change.
–Max Schleicher, Fall 2020 DM Graduate Fellow